Unmatched in its focus on a concise and popular emerging genre, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction features 26 eminent writers, editors, and teachers offering expert analysis, focused exercises, and helpful examples of what make the brief essay form such a perfect medium for experimentation, insight, and illumination. With a comprehensive introduction to the genre and book by editor Dinty W. Moore, this guide is perfect for both the classroom and the individual writer's desk--an essential handbook for anyone interested in the scintillating and succinct flash nonfiction form. How many words does it take to tell a compelling true story? The answer might surprise you.

FEATURING ESSAYS FROM: Barrie Jean Borich, Jenny Boully, Norma Elia Cantú, Rigoberto González, Philip Graham, Carol Guess, Jeff Gundy, Robin Hemley, Barbara Hurd, Judith Kitchen, Eric LeMay, Dinah Lenney, Bret Lott, Patrick Madden, Lee Martin, Maggie McKnight, Brenda Miller, Kyle Minor, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Anne Panning, Lia Purpura, Peggy Shumaker, Sue William Silverman, Jennifer Sinor, Ira Sukrungruang, Nicole Walker

Find inspiration and insight on writing as a spiritual practice through astute quotes, thoughtful advice, and productive exercises on both mindfulness and craft.

This isn't your typical how to write book. Author Dinty W. Moore, a well-respected writing coach and teacher, thoughtfully illuminates the creative process: where writing and creativity originate, how mindfulness plays into work, how to cultivate good writing habits and grow as a person, and what it means to live a life dedicated to writing.

The Mindful Writer features bite-sized essays that will delight and inform not only writers, but also other artists, mediators and mindfulness practitioners. Built around heartening quotes from famous writers and thinkers, it is a resource that readers will turn to again and again for guidance and encouragement.

This edition includes a new introduction exploring the centrality of mindfulness in a writer's practice and craft as well as a selection of writing prompts to get you started on writing mindfully right away.

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to the pursuit of mental rabbits--a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others--to capture a bit of life on paper.

Crafting the Personal Essay is designed to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay in your own writing. This hands-on, creativity-expanding guide will help you infuse your nonfiction with honesty, personality, and energy. You'll discover:

- An exploration of the basics of essay writing
- Ways to step back and scrutinize your experiences in order to separate out what may be fresh, powerful, surprising or fascinating to a reader
- How to move past private journaling and write for an audience
- How to write eight different types of essays including memoir, travel, humor, and nature essays among others
- Instruction for revision and strategies for getting published
Brimming with helpful examples, exercises, and sample essays, this indispensable guide will help your personal essays transcend the merely private to become powerfully universal.

A collection of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterization issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir, prescribed by the director of creative writing at Ohio University.

People want to write the book they know is inside of them, but they run into stumbling blocks that trouble everyone from beginners to seasoned writers. Drawing on his years of teaching at both the university level and at writing workshops across the country, Professor Dinty W. Moore dons his book-doctor hat to present an authoritative guide to curing the issues that truly plague writers at
all levels. His hard-hitting handbook provides inspiring solutions for diagnoses such as character anemia, flat plot, and silent voice, and is peppered with flashes of Moore's signature wit and unique take on the writing life.

Medicine still contains an oral tradition, passed down in stories: the stories patients tell us, the ones we tell them, and the ones we tell ourselves, writes contributor Madaline Harrison. Bodies of Truth continues this tradition through a variety of narrative approaches by writers representing all facets of health care. And, since all of us have been or will be touched by illness or disability--our own or that of a loved one--at some point in our lives, any reader of this anthology can relate to the challenges, frustrations, and pain--both physical and emotional--that the contributors have experienced.

Bodies of Truth offers perspectives on a wide array of issues, from food allergies, cancer, and neurology to mental health, autoimmune disorders, and therapeutic music. These experiences are recounted by patients, nurses, doctors, parents, children, caregivers, and others who attempt to articulate the intangible human and emotional factors that surround life when it intersects with the medical field.

The Accidental Buddhist is the funny, provocative story of how Dinty Moore went looking for the faith he'd lost in what might seem the most unlikely of places: the ancient Eastern tradition of Buddhism. Moore demystifies and explains the contradictions and concepts of this most mystic-seeming of religious traditions. This plain-spoken, insightful look at the dharma in America will fascinate anyone curious about the wisdom of other cultures and other religions.

Cutting through religious jargon and abstract concepts, Moore explains in clear terms why Buddhism is becoming part of popular culture. He has the rare ability to be at once sincere about religion and good-humored about the human condition. The Accidental Buddhist never takes itself too seriously--which, as Moore discovers, Buddhists aren't supposed to do, even when they are mindful, enlightened, and sitting perfectly still.

Moore's hilarious and sometimes irreverent look at Buddhism is a perfect primer for the budding Buddhist.--Publishers Weekly

Moore's] witty and candid 'regular guy' approach to these experiences is entertaining and comforting, and his conclusions are right on target.--Booklist

Insouciant and irreverent are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books--and, invariably, hilarious. Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem, this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author's early life--the Kennedy assassination, Nixon's resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few--shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today's world for all of us who spent our formative years in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms--a coroner's report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan--aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.

Going beyond the typical how to write book, The Mindful Writer illuminates the creative process: where writing and creativity originate, how mindfulness plays into work, how to cultivate good writing habits, how to grow as a writer and a person, and what it means to live a life dedicated to the craft of writing. There's not a writer alive, novice or master, who will not benefit from this book and fall in love with it. Cover to cover, this wise little book is riveting and delightful.

The Mindful Writer will be a book that readers will turn to again and again as a source inspiration, guidance, and support.